Only twice in my life have I a relied on a guidebook to help me get through a novel. I would have certainly met my doom somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis if, in pursuit ofJames Joyce’s Ulysses,I had not kept DonGifford and RobertSeidman’s 700 pagesof annotations at my side. My other literary survivalmanual came into play whenreading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’sRainbow—here my lifeline was Steve Weisenburger’s guide to the sources and contexts of this 300,000word behemoth.

The fascination of what’s difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins…

Thus wrote Yeats. But the Irish bard didn’t livelong enough to experience Gravity’s Rainbow,having exited the stage around the time Mr. Pynchon showed up on the scene. Yet that whole period, from late Yeats through early Pynchon, might beconsidered, in retrospect, as the Age of Difficulty,the time when readers expected a certain degree of hardship when addressing new literary masterworks.

But Gravity’s Rainbow wasn't just hardship, it was a bloody gulag. Once you entered, there were no guarantees you would ever emerge. Countless souls never survived it to the last page, without even a Solzhenitsyn around to document their struggles and failures.

Even from the start, the verdicts were mixed. Whena three-member Pulitzer Prize jury recommendedthat Pynchon’s novel receive the award for fiction,the Pulitzer board over-ruled them—as a result, no fiction award was given out that year. In a strange twist—one that might have surprised even the reclusive author—Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula, a prestigious science fiction award,but lost out to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. When Pynchon’s weighty novel did rack upa big honor, the National Book Award, the authordidn’t bother to show up for the ceremony, sending comedian Irwin Corey—famous for his impersonations of a drunk professor—on his behalf.

Is Gravity’s Rainbow really a work of speculative or science fiction? Certainly science and technology playa key role in this novel, where they are mixed with fantastic and paranormal elements. We are givenhints about a puzzling missile component from World War II, a black box constructed out of a mysterious plastic called Imipolex G. We are presented with a quasi-mystical correlation between the love life of character Tyrone Slothrop and the location of V2 missile bombings. We encounter many elements ofthe occult and metaphysical, with Tarot-related symbols playing an especially noticeable role. An ambitious critic might even construct a mathematical interpretation of Pynchon's work, celebrating its persistence in turning probability and statistics ontheir head—although I suspect that for our authorthis twist is more an application of Jung’s concept of synchronicity than the playing out of a sci-fi worldview.

"Pynchon creates a world in which some subatomic characteristics of reality are dealt with at the level of everyday life," Professor Kathryn Hume has written,in defense of the sci-fi credentials of Gravity’s Rainbow. "Pseudo-Heisenbergian uncertainty bedevils the main characters, but even moreimportant it constrains the readers." ProfessorDavid Ketterer has countered with a diametrically opposed position: "I can testify that [Gravity’s Rainbow] is not a work of SF in any real sense," he writes. "Furthermore in my opinion it is not a particularly good book marred as it is by a kind of elephantiasis…."

So whom do we back in this game of dueling professors? I have no problem acknowledging thesci-fi elements in this book. But, in all fairness, almost everything shows up at some point in this immense novel. I remember hearing locals describe a specific Paris café where, if you waited long enough, anybody you wanted to see would stroll by the sidewalk tables. Gravity’s Rainbow is the literary equivalent. If you keep pushing ahead you will find every possible ingredient—philosophy, poetry, silly songs, puns, equations, pop culture references of various sorts,real and distorted historical events, and the inter-action of some 400 characters.

Perhaps the most surprising ingredient of all arrivesin part three of this labyrinthine work. During the course of the section entitled "In the Zone,"Pynchon actually delivers a taut, straight narrative without any of the campy or over-the-top qualities that permeate the rest of this novel. In this interlude, German rocket scientist Franz Pökler is allowed to enjoy annual visits with his daughter Ilse—althoughhe harbors a deep suspicion that the woman he is allowed to meet is not really his child. This compelling sub-plot, rich in psychological implications, stands out as the most perfectly realized section of a turbulent novel. But for Pynchon, the switch to a quasi-Dostoevskian realism is just the exception that proves the rule, the clinching demonstration that no narrative style is excluded from this author’s playbook.

In the final analysis, this very all-inclusiveness stands out as the most salient characteristic of Pynchon’s novel. The postmodern impulse to allow all styles,all contents to mix and mingle, to rub shoulders nomatter how foreign their origins, finds its most complete realization in this big book, which respectno boundaries, knows no limits. Such a project is ultimately bound to produce vertigo among itsreaders, and disappoint those who are seeking some unifying vision, some holistic stance behind it all.

Yet Gravity’s Rainbow always seems to hint thatthis grand blueprint is just around the corner. Thisis part and parcel of Pynchon's most characteristic attitude, namely his paranoia. The paranoid always believe that some huge conspiracy theory exists that can connect all the dots, resolve all the mysteries, settle all the bets. In a book in which paranoia looms so large, readers are bound to expect the same thing. Gravity’s Rainbow is premised on an ultimate explanation that, in the final analysis, it cannot deliver.

In retrospect, Gravity’s Rainbow must be seen asan end-of-an-era work—an ironic verdict given howits most fervent fans embraced it, at the time of its initial release, as a pathway to the literary future. But such disappointed expectations were part and parcel of many things that arrived on our doorstep around the time the promises of the 1960s gave wayto the realities of the 1970s. After Gravity's Rainbow, the rules of literary fiction changed again, mostly in ways Pynchon could not have anticipated. Different styles came into ascendancy—minimalism, magical realism, postcolonial fiction, genre mashups of various sorts—in the years following its publication. In more recent decades, an even more surprising twist,namely the avoidance of almost any sort of ideology(you can call this the Franzen syndrome, if you like), has begun to permeate the world of literary fiction,as more and more novelists focus on plot, character development, pacing and plain old fashioned storytelling.

In such an environment, Pynchon may still havemany admirers, but few who are willing to follow inhis footsteps. Even an explicitly Pynchonian novel of more modern times, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, eventually rests its fictive universe on a compassionate, humanistic foundation, one that hasno equivalent in Pynchon’s worldview. If Pynchon’s books were boats, they would be ones without a sea floor on which to set anchor.

Even if daring young writers today were boldenough to adopt Pynchon as a role model, their publishers would almost certainly refuse to go alongfor the ride. Just as Pynchon’s refusal to give interviews and make appearances would not be tolerated in a novelist making a debut today, thekind of large rambling books he built his reputationon would be DOA when they showed up on an editor’s desk. For these very reasons, Gravity's Rainbow is likely to seem just as prickly and uncooperative fifty years from now as it did when it was first published—perhaps even more so, as readers forget what it islike to grapple with deliberately difficult works. YetI suspect that this is exactly the kind of equivocal legacy Mr. Pynchon would want for this daunting, bloated book.